The fields of rapid prototyping and fabrication have generally sought to achieve scalable shape-making methods through digital means. Prior machines in the field have employed digital computation and communication algorithms to control analog mechanical equipment that additively or subtractively forms shapes from analog bulk material. Use of digital materials instead of the analog materials in current schemes could permit rapid prototyping and fabrication of any shape using simple, identical discrete units.
Many chain, spine, or snake robots have been proposed in the past, but few rely on simple units with low degrees of freedom per unit. The fields of reconfigurable and modular robotics have also explored devices that perform global approximations of folding or change in density, but prior work does not demonstrate a design with the ability to perform these changes using a continuous structure of simple, discrete, and identical components. Prior work also does not show a system with the geometric and mechanical ability to form any two-dimensional or three-dimensional shape.
While the field of distributed control systems has explored distributed algorithms for configuration and motion planning, little work has shown the use of a computationally universal in-band cellular automata for global control of devices consisting of very simple discrete units. Test cases exist for cellular automata-based task completion algorithms, such as locomotion with obstacle avoidance, that use complex and highly specialized mechanical components and devices, but neither generalized computational nor generalized mechanical models have previously been proposed.
The field of medicine seeks conformational devices that can be built at small scales and meet specific biocompatibility and imaging environment requirements, thus requiring designs that can be easily adapted to a wide range of materials. Also of interest in the medical field are devices that are deployable and meet very specific strength and conformation requirements. In addition, many other fields, such as optics, haptics, aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics, also have applications that call for reconfigurable and highly precisely shaped surfaces, ranging from kilometer scale solar or radio reflectors to meter scale vehicle control surfaces, to active and adaptive objects with micron scale features.